bionic (4) audit.4freebsd.gz

NAME

     audit — Security Event Audit

SYNOPSIS

     options AUDIT

DESCRIPTION

     Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant
     events, and is intended to meet the requirements of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection
     Profile (CAPP) evaluation.  The FreeBSD audit facility implements the de facto industry standard BSM API,
     file formats, and command line interface, first found in the Solaris operating system.  Information on the
     user space implementation can be found in libbsm(3).

     Audit support is enabled at boot, if present in the kernel, using an rc.conf(5) flag.  The audit daemon,
     auditd(8), is responsible for configuring the kernel to perform audit, pushing configuration data from the
     various audit configuration files into the kernel.

   Audit Special Device
     The kernel audit facility provides a special device, /dev/audit, which is used by auditd(8) to monitor for
     audit events, such as requests to cycle the log, low disk space conditions, and requests to terminate
     auditing.  This device is not intended for use by applications.

   Audit Pipe Special Devices
     Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a configurable live tracking mechanism to
     allow applications to tee the audit trail, as well as to configure custom preselection parameters to track
     users and events in a fine-grained manner.

SEE ALSO

     auditreduce(1), praudit(1), audit(2), auditctl(2), auditon(2), getaudit(2), getauid(2), poll(2), select(2),
     setaudit(2), setauid(2), libbsm(3), auditpipe(4), audit.log(5), audit_class(5), audit_control(5),
     audit_event(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8), auditd(8), auditdistd(8)

HISTORY

     The OpenBSM implementation was created by McAfee Research, the security division of McAfee Inc., under
     contract to Apple Computer Inc. in 2004.  It was subsequently adopted by the TrustedBSD Project as the
     foundation for the OpenBSM distribution.

     Support for kernel audit first appeared in FreeBSD 6.2.

AUTHORS

     This software was created by McAfee Research, the security research division of McAfee, Inc., under
     contract to Apple Computer Inc.  Additional authors include Wayne Salamon, Robert Watson, and SPARTA Inc.

     The Basic Security Module (BSM) interface to audit records and audit event stream format were defined by
     Sun Microsystems.

     This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS

     The FreeBSD kernel does not fully validate that audit records submitted by user applications are
     syntactically valid BSM; as submission of records is limited to privileged processes, this is not a
     critical bug.

     Instrumentation of auditable events in the kernel is not complete, as some system calls do not generate
     audit records, or generate audit records with incomplete argument information.

     Mandatory Access Control (MAC) labels, as provided by the mac(4) facility, are not audited as part of
     records involving MAC decisions.